The New Pokémon Card App Is Teaching Me the Restraint of Card-Collecting Youth

There have been many attempts to bring the wildly successful Pokémon TCG into the digital ether (shout out to the Game Boy classic), but the latest, Pokémon Pocket, already might be the most successful of them all. Released last week, it’s already been downloaded by over 10 million people, and is raking in Pokédollars hand over fist. But I haven’t felt the urge to hand over any cash in my time with the game so far, and it’s mostly because of one specific little mechanic that brings me back to my youth playing the card game.

There’s a lot that makes Pocket the success it’s already become. Unlike the other official TCG app, it’s currently entirely untethered from the physical game itself, using unique sets of cards and no physical crossover beyond utilizing contemporary mechanics and rules. This means Pocket can also do wild stuff—including make unique cards that can only work in a digital environment, like cards that have card art you can peer inside via a video animation. It also works in its favor that, while there are cards featuring Pokémon from multiple generations of the critters, Pocket has launched with a set that by and large focuses on the original 151 Pokémon, with most of its rarer alternate art cards or powerful “EX” Pokémon draw on the likes of Mewtwo, Pikachu, the original starter Pokémon or the legendary birds. Generation 1 nostalgia almost always works in Pokémon‘s favor!

But the thing that has kept me invested is actually its in its limitations: you get two free booster packs to open a day (with an extra one if you subscribe to the game’s premium version, which has been free for the first couple of weeks). You get pop up notification on your phone once every 10 hours or so, you go in, you open your pack, you go out. It’s a nice little casual commitment, but it also reminds me of being a kid when all you’d be able to get with your pocket money was a booster or two while shopping.

I am a grown adult now who can do responsible grown adult things like buy a booster box whenever the mood to dive into the physical TCG strikes me, and there are, of course, ways to open more in Pocket, by buying stacks of game currencies that you otherwise grind out doing daily missions or by leveling up through collection and battling. But there’s just something that feels oddly comforting about facing that limitation of my childhood here again, that, at least right now in Pocket‘s life cycle, every little pack of cards counts and feels special, and the hits of finding a particularly rare card all the more invigorating.

It’s a limitation I’m putting on myself as much as the game is. Pocket puts a surprising amount of tangibility into the act of opening these free digital packs, to engender that feeling all the more strongly. You’ve given a wheel of potential packs to spin through with a flick of your phone screen (some of which are reversed, so you open them back-to-front to get the rarer cards inside first, like some kind of heathen). You can hold your finger down on a pack to move it about and inspect it, and then do a little swipe to slice off the top of the booster and reveal what’s inside. People are even already engaged in hearsay about how you can tell which boosters have rare cards inside, like being a kid on the playground all over again hearing about the Totally Real Ultra Rare Pokémon someone found in their copy of Red or Blue.

It’s a reverence that is lost if you just go all in, with real money or otherwise, and open packs in bulk—these little rituals are condensed to get to the swath of cards you’re opening up, and the specialness of this being all you’ve got (so you have to make the most out of whatever you pull), plays into the nostalgia that Pokémon weaponizes so expertly. It’s the rare kind of “freemium” game experience where I feel like I’m getting a little extra reward by not spending money on it in the process, and more likely it’s going to help Pocket keep its hooks in me for a while longer than my initial curiosity thought it might… and not just because it’s going to take me much longer to catch ’em all if I’m just opening a handful of booster packs a day.

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